From It’s All Politics Like business in general, politics is not a spectator sport. You cannot afford to be apolitical at work if you have any aspirations for advancement. The only way to avoid politics is to avoid people—by finding an out-of-the-way corner where you can do your job. Of course, it’s the same job you’ll likely be doing for the rest of your career. In any job, when you reach a certain level of technical competence, politics is what makes all the difference with regard to success. At that point, it is indeed all politics. Everyday brilliant people take a backseat to their politically adept colleagues by failing to win crucial support for their ideas. Sometimes politics involves going around or bending rules, but more typically it’s about positioning your ideas in a favorable light, and knowing what to say, and how and when to say it.… Keep in mind that people benefit from perpetuating the image of politics as something you either know or you don’t. Ignore them. Political acumen is largely learned from observation. And then it’s a matter of practice, practice, practice. When a journalist suggested that golfing great Gary Player was very lucky, he replied: “It’s funny, but the more I practice, the luckier I get.” The same is true of politics. An indispensable guide to mastering the ins and outs of office politics—the single most important factor in getting ahead in your career As management professor and consultant Kathleen Reardon explains in her new book, It's All Politics, talent and hard work alone will not get you to the top. What separates the winners from the losers in corporate life is politics. As Reardon explains, the most talented and accomplished employees often take a backseat to their politically adept coworkers, losing ground in the race to get ahead—sometimes even losing their jobs. Why? Because they’ve failed to manage the important relationships with the people who can best reward their creativity and intelligence. To determine whether you need a crash course in Office Politics 101, ask yourself the following questions: Do I get credit for my ideas? Do I know how to deal with a difficult colleague? Do I get the plum assignments? Do I have a mentor? Do I say no gracefully and pick my battles wisely? Am I in the loop? Reardon has interviewed hundreds of employees, from successful veterans to aspiring hopefuls, examining why some people who work hard and effectively at their jobs fall behind, while those who are adept at “reading the office tea leaves” forge ahead. Being politically savvy doesn’t mean being unethical or devious. At heart, it’s about listening to and relating to others, and making choices that advance everyone’s goals. Like it or not, when it comes to work, it’s all politics. And politics is all about knowing what to say, when to say it, and who to say it to.

How Washington Made the Rich Richer--and Turned Its Back on the Middle ClassAuthor: Jacob S. Hacker,Paul PiersonPublisher: Simon and SchusterISBN: 1416593845Category: Political SciencePage: 368View: 3415

A groundbreaking work that identifies the real culprit behind one of the great economic crimes of our time— the growing inequality of incomes between the vast majority of Americans and the richest of the rich. We all know that the very rich have gotten a lot richer these past few decades while most Americans haven’t. In fact, the exorbitantly paid have continued to thrive during the current economic crisis, even as the rest of Americans have continued to fall behind. Why do the “haveit- alls” have so much more? And how have they managed to restructure the economy to reap the lion’s share of the gains and shift the costs of their new economic playground downward, tearing new holes in the safety net and saddling all of us with increased debt and risk? Lots of so-called experts claim to have solved this great mystery, but no one has really gotten to the bottom of it—until now. In their lively and provocative Winner-Take-All Politics, renowned political scientists Jacob S. Hacker and Paul Pierson demonstrate convincingly that the usual suspects—foreign trade and financial globalization, technological changes in the workplace, increased education at the top—are largely innocent of the charges against them. Instead, they indict an unlikely suspect and take us on an entertaining tour of the mountain of evidence against the culprit. The guilty party is American politics. Runaway inequality and the present economic crisis reflect what government has done to aid the rich and what it has not done to safeguard the interests of the middle class. The winner-take-all economy is primarily a result of winner-take-all politics. In an innovative historical departure, Hacker and Pierson trace the rise of the winner-take-all economy back to the late 1970s when, under a Democratic president and a Democratic Congress, a major transformation of American politics occurred. With big business and conservative ideologues organizing themselves to undo the regulations and progressive tax policies that had helped ensure a fair distribution of economic rewards, deregulation got under way, taxes were cut for the wealthiest, and business decisively defeated labor in Washington. And this transformation continued under Reagan and the Bushes as well as under Clinton, with both parties catering to the interests of those at the very top. Hacker and Pierson’s gripping narration of the epic battles waged during President Obama’s first two years in office reveals an unpleasant but catalyzing truth: winner-take-all politics, while under challenge, is still very much with us. Winner-Take-All Politics—part revelatory history, part political analysis, part intellectual journey— shows how a political system that traditionally has been responsive to the interests of the middle class has been hijacked by the superrich. In doing so, it not only changes how we think about American politics, but also points the way to rebuilding a democracy that serves the interests of the many rather than just those of the wealthy few.

The word ‘rationality’ and its cognates, like ‘reason’, have multiple contexts and connotations. Rational calculation can be contrasted with rational interpretation. There is the rationality of proof and of persuasion, of tradition and of the criticism of tradition. Rationalism (and rationalists) can be reasonable or unreasonable. Reason is sometimes distinguished from revelation, superstition, convention, prejudice, emotion, and chance, but all of these also involve reasoning. In politics, three views of rationality – economic, moral, and historical – have been especially important, often defining approaches to politics and political theory such as utilitarianism and rational choice theory. These approaches privilege positive or natural law, responsibilities, or human rights, and emphasize the importance of culture and tradition, and therefore meaning and context. This book explores the understanding of rationality in politics and the relations between different approaches to rationality. Among the topics considered are the limits of rationality, the role of imagination and emotion in politics, the meaning of political realism, the nature of political judgment, and the relationship between theory and practice. This book was originally published as a special issue of Global Discourse.

In Israel's Higher Law, Steven V. Mazie sheds new light on the relationship between liberalism and religion through a detailed assessment of the Jewish state. Drawing on in-depth interviews with Israeli citizens, this compelling work scrutinizes the ways in which Israelis conceptualize and debate their polity's religion-state arrangement.

Law is the great concealer; and law is everywhere. Or so claimed Marxists once upon a time. [Law] was imbricated within the mode of production and productive relations themselves . . . it intruded brusquely within alien categories, re-appearing bewigged and gowned in the form of ideology; . . . it was an arm of politics and politics was one of its arms; it was an academic discipline, subjected to the rigour of its own autonomous logic, it contributed to the definition of the self-identity of both the rulers 1 and the ruled. Does the old critique of domination still hold any sway? Apparently not. Or so even scholars of the far Left keep reminding us in their eagerness to embrace law and proclaim their allegiance to the new constitutional politics of civil society. Old Marxists now describe popular sovereignty as 'co-original' with, and democracy 'internally linked' to 2 constitutional rights and find it hard to remember what it was they once disagreed with liberals about. No tension left between emancipatory politics and oppressive law; instead we have reciprocal constitution, simultaneous realisation. In the Left's embracing of the new constitutionalisms its old critique of law - the critique of the law's concealment of class inequality, class conflict and class action - is left behind.

Politics as Radical Creation examines the meaning of democratic practice through the critical social theory of the Frankfurt School. It provides an understanding of democratic politics as a potentially performative good-in-itself, undertaken not just to the extent that it seeks to achieve a certain extrinsic goal, but also in that it functions as a medium for the expression of creative human impulses. Christopher Holman develops this potential model through a critical examination of the political philosophies of Herbert Marcuse and Hannah Arendt. Holman argues that, while Arendt and Marcuse’s respective theorizations each ultimately restrict the potential scope of creative human expression, their juxtaposition – which has not been previously explored – results in a more comprehensive theory of democratic existence, one that is uniquely able to affirm the creative capacities of the human being. Yielding important theoretical results that will interest scholars of each theorist and of theories of democracy more generally, Politics as Radical Creation provides a valuable means for rethinking the nature of contemporary democratic practice.

Since the late 1780s historians and jurists have questioned what was uppermost in the minds of the framers of the United States Constitution. In surveying the thirteen states’ experiences as colonies and under the Articles of Confederation, one is struck more by their great diversity than by their commonalities. In this groundbreaking historical work, Christopher Collier brings to the fore an interpretation virtually neglected since the mid-nineteenth century: the view from the states, in which the creation and ratification of the new Constitution reflected a unique combination of internal and external needs. All Politics Is Local closely analyzes exactly what Connecticut constituents expected their representatives to achieve in Philadelphia and suggests that other states’ citizens also demanded their own special returns. Collier avoids popular theory in his convincing argument that any serious modern effort to understand the Constitution as conceived by its framers must pay close attention to the state-specific needs and desires of the era. Challenging all previous interpretations, Collier demonstrates that Connecticut’s forty antifederalist representatives were motivated not by economic, geographic, intellectual, or ideological factors, but by family and militia connections, local politics, and other considerations that had nothing at all to do with the Constitution. He finds no overarching truth, no common ideological thread binding the antifederalists together, which leads him to call for the same state-centered micro-study for the other twelve founding states. To do less leaves historical and contemporary interpretations of the U.S. Constitution not simply blurred around the edges but incomplete at the core as well. Collier delights and surprises readers in proving—with his trademark impeccable historical scholarship, firm grasp of known sources, and ample new material—that in the case of Connecticut, a stalwart defender of the provincial prerogative, all politics is and was, to one degree or another, local.

Focusing on Marburg, a contentious university town where voters demonstrated strong electoral support for Adolf Hitler's National Socialist party, this imaginative study discusses the political role of small-town organizational life and painstakingly reconstructs the full range of Nazi sympathizers' cross-affiliations with local voluntary groups.

From the presidential race to the battle for the office of New York City mayor, American political candidates’ approach to new media strategy is increasingly what makes or breaks their campaign. Targeted outreach on Facebook and Twitter, placement of a well-timed viral ad, and the ability to roll with the memes, flame wars, and downvotes that might spring from ordinary citizens’ engagement with the issues—these skills are heralded as crucial for anyone hoping to get their views heard in a chaotic election cycle. But just how effective are the kinds of media strategies that American politicians employ? And what effect, if any, do citizen-created political media have on the tide of public opinion? In Controlling the Message, Farrar-Myers and Vaughn curate a series of case studies that use real-time original research from the 2012 election season to explore how politicians and ordinary citizens use and consume new media during political campaigns. Broken down into sections that examine new media strategy from the highest echelons of campaign management all the way down to passive citizen engagement with campaign issues in places like online comment forums, the book ultimately reveals that political messaging in today’s diverse new media landscape is a fragile, unpredictable, and sometimes futile process. The result is a collection that both interprets important historical data from a watershed campaign season and also explains myriad approaches to political campaign media scholarship—an ideal volume for students, scholars, and political analysts alike.

Over the centuries, the question of "good" or "effective" governance has undergone several transformations and ramifications to fit within certain social, cultural and historical contexts. What defines political knowledge? What is the measure of expert political leadership? Various interpretations, perspectives, and re-conceptualizations emerge as one moves from Plato to the present. This edited book explores the relationship between political expertise, which is defined as "scientific statesmanship or governance," and political leadership throughout the history of ideas. An outstanding group of experts study and analyze the ideas of significant philosophers, such as Plato, Aristotle, Augustine, Machiavelli, Hobbes, Locke, Montesquieu, Kant, Burke, Comte, and Weber, among others. The contributors aim to interpret these thinkers’ approaches to "scientific statesmanship," deepening our understanding of the idea itself and decoding its theoretical complexities. In the face of the ongoing crisis of the traditional party system and the eroding structures within the new cultural-financial and political environment in the era of globalization, tracing the connection between Plato’s idealist statesmanship to twentieth-century modernist politics is an important and ever-challenging enterprise; one that promises to interest scholars of the history of western political thought, philosophy, classics and the classical tradition, political science, and sociology.

This collection of essays draws together work done during a period of more than fifteen years. In the course of these years much has changed, including much about politics. Patterns of political activity have been trans formed. Ways in which we had been accustomed to construe politics have been substantially modified and sometimes replaced. Some apparently in tractable conflicts have been resolved. Other, apparently more manageable, conflicts have shown shocking durability. A number of political doctrines once considered indefinitely serviceable have lost all relevance. And the material and technical resources at our disposal look strikingly different than they did just a few years ago. Practical politics of whatever stripe encounters at every turn ever more grave environmental degradation. But, or so this collection assumes, not everything political has changed. Some political issues, both "theoretical" and "practical," remain persistently trenchant. Questions like the following demand ever renewed consideration. What is the point and worth of belonging to a political community? What entitlements and responsibilities follow upon such membership? Or even more fundamentally, what conditions are required for there to be politics at all? Taken together, the essays collected in this volume propose a way both to understand and to engage in politics which is properly responsive both to perennial political issues and to the peculiar exigencies of our era. Some of them present criticisms of widely held, warmly cherished ways of addressing political matters. Others propose constructive alternatives.

How Political Choices Undermine Citizen Participation and what We Can Do about itAuthor: Yvette M. Alex-AssensohPublisher: Brookings Institution PressISBN: 9780815754046Category: Political SciencePage: 228View: 8881

"Documents how recent trends in civic engagement have been shaped by political institutions and public policies and recommends ways to increase the amount, quality, and distribution of civic engagement, focusing on elections, the metropolis, and the nonpr